According to the United Nations World Food Program, there are close to 900 million malnourished people in the world. The malnourishment epidemic is particularly striking in the developing nations of the world, where one in six children is underweight. The paucity of available food can be attributed to many socioeconomic factors; however, regardless of ultimate cause, the fact remains that there is a shortage of food available to feed a growing world population, which is expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050. The United Nations estimates that agricultural yields must increase by 70-100% to teed the projected global population in 2050.
These startling world population and malnutrition figures highlight the importance of agricultural efficiency and productivity, in sustaining the world's growing population. The technological advancements achieved by modern row crop agriculture, which has led to never before seen crop yields, are impressive. However, despite the advancements made by technological innovations such as genetically engineered crops and new novel pesticidal and herbicidal compounds, there is a need for improved crop performance, in order to meet the demands of an exponentially increasing global population.
Scientists have estimated that if the global agricultural “yield gap” (which is the difference between the best observed yield and results elsewhere) could be closed, then worldwide crop production would rise by 45-70%. That is, if all farmers, regardless of worldwide location, could achieve the highest attainable yield expected for their respective regions, then a great majority of the deficiencies in worldwide food production could be addressed. However, solving the problem of how to achieve higher yields across a heterogenous worldwide landscape are difficult.
Often, yield gaps can be explained by inadequate water, substandard farming practices, inadequate fertilizers, and the non-availability of herbicides and pesticides. However, to vastly increase the worldwide use of water, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, would not only be economically infeasible for most of the world, but would have negative environmental consequences.
Thus, meeting global agricultural yield expectations, by simply scaling up current high-input agricultural systems utilized in most of the developed world is simply not feasible.
There is therefore an urgent need in the art for improved methods of increasing crop performance and imparting beneficial traits to desired plant species.